The youngest in her family, mezzo Marianne Crebassa never knew her Spanish grandparents. But their memory and myth was preserved in the stories and photographs she encountered as a child, shaping a fascination which, she explains, now takes musical form in the irresistible Seguidilles.

Anyone who has heard Crebassa’s voice in concert or on stage – the enveloping, voluptuous warmth of her middle-register, the commanding clarity of the top and dusky occlusion of the bottom – will already be counting the moments until she tackles her first Carmen. The excerpts we get here only add to the tease, but they’re just the headlines of a recital ranging across both opera and song, giving us perspectives of Spain seen through both Spanish and French eyes: dramatic, descriptive, meditative.

Crebassa mentions the ‘serious eyes’ of the women in the family albums, and it’s this intensity that’s uppermost here. Her Habanera is all control and no histrionics; this is a seductress who lets her audience come to her, leaves the door of sexual possibility ajar but never flings it wide. It’s a long...